| My tweets |
[May. 26th, 2012|12:00 pm] |
- Fri, 16:54: Listening to George Dyson talk about the history of computing, and all the figures that built our world. Fascinating. #FireX
- Fri, 16:56: Writing that last tweet made me realise that #FireX is like a three day episode of "In Our Time". A conversation about the future.
- Fri, 16:57: RT @marypcbuk: George Dyson: I believe technology is part of life; my dad believes life is part of technology #firex
- Fri, 17:00: George Dyson on hardware "that embodies code", "numbers that can reproduce themselves" in "A world driven by self-replicating code" #FireX
- Fri, 17:07: Dragon has docked. Congratulations to @elonmusk and SpaceX. Now do it again!
- Fri, 17:38: Next up at #FireX, @DavidBrin1 interviewing Kim Stanley Robinson about the world in 20 years time.
- Fri, 17:43: Kim Stanley Robinson discussing the importance of utopian fiction, like that of H.G. Wells in the building of our modern world. #FireX
- Fri, 17:50: "Near future science fiction, the best realism of our time" Kim Stanley Robinson on the importance of genre at #FireX
- Fri, 17:51: RT @gkd4434: Are the next 50 yrs a choke point in the history of man for the next 1000 yrs? Lots of conditions exist for system failures ...
- Fri, 17:51: RT @michaeljredding: Paraphrasing George Dyson: humans are analog but we replicate digitally (DNA) #FiReX
( Read more... ) |
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| My tweets |
[May. 26th, 2012|12:00 pm] |
- Fri, 16:42: George Dyson: I believe technology is part of life; my dad believes life is part of technology #firex
- Fri, 16:58: RT @shanselman: If you ask the question "is it poisonous?" and you are in Australia, the answer is YES.
- Fri, 17:51: David Brin & Kim Stanley Robinson celebrate Towel Day that adds up to 42 & talk SF tropes #firex http://t.co/MN0LifEe
- Fri, 17:56: KSR: writing is a technology, language is a technology, justice is a technology,economics is a technology; what we could use them for #firex
- Fri, 18:00: KSR: Most novel writing not matter of creativity springing full blown; writers who think that way writing trivial &uninteresting art #firex
- Fri, 18:00: CONT What it is, is a sensitive receiver of what's going in and try to write a story of interest to people who know what's going on #firex
- Fri, 18:03: KSR: science fiction is a larger question of the sciences &the humanities; conversation on values guiding application of science/tech #firex
- Fri, 18:40: Better food labelling would reflect the true costs & externalities, explain why organic costs more by showing contaminants avoided #firex
- Fri, 18:46: Software with everything http://t.co/FNIughWn #zdnetuk
- Fri, 18:52: handy MS page showing if you have Do Not Track enabled in your browser w instructions for turning it on http://t.co/P8wcXLDN (not just #IE)
( Read more... ) |
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| Tech: iPad Apps - Three days in. |
[May. 26th, 2012|11:06 am] |
So I have had the iPad for three days. iOS isn't entirely new to me as I have an old iPhone and Anna has her iPad (and lots of cables for connecting it to various things). Here are some of the iPad apps I have installed. You will have to find links yourself. I haven't jailbroken it yet so everything here is available via iTunes Store.
( Loads of iPad apps )
I have a plan to use Anna's sewing machine to make an iPad cover out of an old pair of denim jeans. How hard can it be?
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| May Books 10) The Great O'Neill, by Sean O'Faolain |
[May. 26th, 2012|09:47 am] |
Like most kids growing up in Catholic Ireland, I "did" some of O'Faolain's short stories at school. I guess I hadn't appreciated how big a figure he was in the (admittedly small) world of the arts in mid-century Ireland, constructing the literary self-image of the new state as it found its way to becoming the Republic. This book was his third history book in five years, coming after his edition of Wolfe Tone's autobiography in 1937 and his biography of Daniel O'Connell in 1938; he claims not to be attempting a serious academic history, but this is disingenuous; he must have realised that a book on such a subject by a writer of his profile would establish received wisdom for decades to come.
I'm more interested in the subject than the writer. O'Neill was the leader of the Irish side in the last struggle between the old Gaelic order and the London government; surrendering after nine years of war in 1603, he slipped away to exile in Rome and died there. For O'Faolain's purposes, he is of course a hero in that he tried but failed to establish an independent Irish state. But there were a couple of interesting slants which prevent it from being a hagiography.
Hiram Morgan has disproved one of the key planks of O'Faolain's narrative, that the young O'Neill was fostered in England, and Morgan is rather better on the overall politics and culture of the era. It's a bit of a shame, actually, because O'Faolain is big on the importance of communication and even compromise with the English, and O'Neill's (fictional) early life in England equips him to be the right man for this job. Where O'Faolain does better than Morgan is on the human level. His sixteenth-century Ireland is a rather sexy place (certainly in comparison to the repressed de Valera / McQuaid state). O'Neill's marital history is explained in great detail, including the elopement with Mabel Bagenal, the daughter of one of his regional English rivals. O'Faolain is fairly neutral rather than scandalised about this; I guess that he hoped his readers would draw their own conclusions.
And his account of the end of the war is rather good, though here he does slip into moral lessons from history a bit. Though a proud Cork man himself, O'Faolain admits that Kinsale was practically the worst place for the Spanish to land; had they come anywhere in the north or northwest coast, O'Faolain reckons they would have won the war fairly quickly. As it was, a less good English leader than Mountjoy could easily have screwed up the siege. But it's impossible to find a positive description of the way the arriving Irish soldiers blundered into a catastrophic and decisive defeat, and O'Faolain goes into splendid descriptive detail about it. O'Neill is in the end the victim of a bad Spanish decision, unusually good English command, and a lack of discipline among his own supporters and allies. My memory is that Cyril Falls, writing only a few years later and as an avowed Unionist, is actually a bit more even-handed in his assessment.
Anyway, not an essential book for historical understanding of the period, but an important book for understanding more recent perceptions of the events. And quite a good read. |
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| Robots, fire, solar eclipses: all things we saw at Maker Faire |
[May. 26th, 2012|12:45 am] |
Maker Faire was a little bit more like work this year as we did more scheduled interviews than usual and concentrated a little more on companies we could write about, but there was plenty of just really cool stuff as well.
I wrote up a piece for Tom's Guide that I pitched as the quirky side of tech - robotics (robot plant waterers, robot camera tripods that follow you around filming), DIY hardware, 3d printing, tiny computers like Raspberry Pi, milk jugs that tell you when the milk goes off, conductive paint (so you can literally draw a circuit board), electroluminescent screens you can print like a T shirt and the future of the kind of hardware projects that will show up on Kickstarter. You can read about all that and more over at http://www.tomsguide.com/us/pictures-story/373-maker-faire-diy-projects.html
We interviewed Eben Upton of the Raspberry Pi foundation and reminisced happily about 8-bit computing and game writers who made so much money they bought Porsche's they were too young to drive; that's coming soon on TechRadar.
 I took lots more photos than fitted in the feature, many of them of delightful flaming sculptures; we also got to watch the solar eclipse through a handheld safety viewer, a pinhole in a sheet of card, a stretched sheet of mylar, the shadows of the trees and a proper telescope with safety filters that let us see a sunspot.
More pictures on my SkyDrive
The weekend was great fun as usual, very tasty thanks to 4505 Meats whose 'pork; the noun not the verb' T shirt is in my future as a tribute to deep fried mac and cheese with bacon-studded frankfurter & sweet chili pork rinds, and exhausting. It was so nice to tumble into a hot tub afterwards. This whole trip has been fun, informative, tasty and exhausting and we're only halfway through. So far:
- we flew to LA (I met a charming raconteur on the plane who regaled me with stories about mass lobster dinners and the music business), tried a new breakfast place with maple bacon biscuits, drove to Vegas via Barstow and the usual excellent cheap Mexican restaurant
- walked about 4 miles a day and wrapped out heads fairly thoroughly around the possibilities for managing Windows 8 & Windows RT as well as how System Center and Intune will manage iPhone and Android. Dinner at Shibuya, birthday lunch at Olives with a table on the patio to see the fountains, the ever-reliable BLT and lunch with  spikeiowa</span> and Tom who were in town for Corflu, at Morel's Steakhouse at Palazzo which is outside on the strip, with a view of the Sirens, excellent Blood Orange margeritas and very nice food but slightly too small umbrellas on a bright bright day. The impressionist garden in the Bellagio and the impressive fountains outside were photographed.
- we headed back to Barstow and on to Paso Robles where we fitted in two new wineries (Looking Glass where they have a lovely garden to taste in and Sculpeterra where they have sculptures and pistachios) and dinner at Artisan (sweet potato bacon tater tots with ramps dressing and rabbit sausage) and then on to San Jose so we could get up far too early for
- the Creative Suite 6 announcement in the de Yonge museum accompanied by inflatable CS logos that were so inflated they nearly lifted the fountain they were tethered to into the sky, and drink-n-interview time on the top floor of the de Yonge tower where you can see out to Point Reyes up the coast and over the hill to the tips of the Golden Gate Bridge. Ritual Coffee and purchasing of my lovely insulated tea glass and then down to San Jose for a week sitting in Barefoot Coffee and writing furiously
- got up far too early to fly to Orlando and talk to RIM about BlackBerry 10; the new CEO has a convincing mien and talks well but didn't have time for the kind of one on one interview where we can really assess how he thinks, but we did have time to talk to Dan Dodge, the QNX founder who impresses us a lot (and laughed heartily when I said QNX reminds me of Plan 9). RIM is working like a startup, with late nights and pranks and more energy than it's had in years. Nice ideas we said to them; now you have to execute. Then our plane was delayed over three hours by potential fog which I hope isn't an omen for RIM. The Virgin America gate staff kept the passengers amused with quizzes (guess the cumulative age of the gate staff) and paper airplane contests and we took off late but in a good mood. Watched Tower Heist which was funnier and more poignant than I expected. Alan Alda continues to rock my world. Landed at 1am SF time, took an hour (an hour!) to get the luggage and the rental car and got to San Jose in hem-hem record time
- proceeded to sleep off the trip, sit in the hummingbird-visited sunny garden of friends writing furiously, enjoy hanging out and catching up, fit in a few meetings with security companies, visit the Facebook campus, visit Parc (a Xerox company), queue for the longest time for a crab/shrimp/crawfish boil that was very yummy, have lunch in the excellent Mayfield Bakery restaurant in the Town & Country (much more than a bakery - fantastic chicken and steak sandwiches and a refreshing pomegranate lime spritzer) and pop over to San Jose to pick up some rose at David Bruce (where we got to meet the winemaker and hear about the chardonnay from the Judgement of Paris he'd tried the previous week). And dinner at Dish Dash (yummy Mediterranean)
and dinner with friends and dinner at Caffe Ricci where the sculptures are screamingly funny - the washerwoman is a woman with a washer-drier on her head
- we decamped to downtown San Jose for the Nvidia GTC conference: virtualising GPUs, learning the reason for locust swarms (can't stop, locust behind me will eat me) which the daily newsletter reported in the style of a con newsletter, and pondering the amateur lunar rover that will launch on a Russian rocket next year. Ate at *all* the downtown San Jose restaurants; Original Joes, Il Fornaio, The Grill on the Alley AND McCormack & Schicks. Do you get points for restaurant bingo? The event party had roulette and blackjack (which I know how to lose at) and poker and craps (which I don't) but we watched the excellent jugglers instead. Nice patter, nice pattern juggling, and chainsaw juggling to the music and pace of The Blue Danube.
- thence a day of writing and errands and on to Maker Faire for the weekend, followed by a two-day drive to Santa Barbara (coffee, cherries, fried chicken and crab and lobster we hammered into submission at Arch Rock Fish) and on to Laguna Beach (scary LA traffic is crazy and scarey) for this week's conference, Future in Review. This is a treat, although a conference that starts at 8am and carries on through conversations and film showing and dinner lectures until at least midnight every night is exhausting as well as fascinating. It covers everything from cloud to the language of prairie dogs, melting glaciers to the uniquely US approach the FTC has to privacy (speedbump to innovation on the information superhighway to how technology could help human trafficking to interviews with Mark Hurd and George Dyson, plus David Brin and Kim Stanley Robinson bringing their towels on stage. Chatting to them afterwards turned into lunch talking SF and different cultures and then a walk on the beach picking up shells and testing the water temperature. Special mention to O Sushi in the mall across from the hotel, which has excellent sushi, sashimi and rolls, all made with real crab the way I like them, plus cripsy fried antenna. I feel like my antenna are crispy fried now (we've been writing this week as well) so bed calls. |
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| May Books 9) Invasion of the Cat-People, by Gary Russell |
[May. 26th, 2012|08:53 am] |
Russell is generally one of the better writers of Who spinoff fiction (the novelisation of the TV movie, the Torchwood novel The Twilight Streets, the Tenth Doctor / Wilf novel Beautiful Chaos) but this early Missing Adventure is not a hit. Aliens who look exactly like cats plan to tear the earth in half, as you do, but are stymied by the fact that continental drift has moved crucial equipment out of alignment over a few dozen millennia (when continents would only have drifted by about a kilometre). Some nice descriptive passages, especially about Cumbria and Polly, admitted by the author to be particular interests in the foreword, but otherwise the narrative is confused and cluttered. You can skip this and I did not really need to reread it. |
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| BayCon Day 1 |
[May. 25th, 2012|11:54 pm] |
After I got shut of work this afternoon, Lisa and I went over to BayCon, registered, and hung around the LoneStarCon Worldcon and Westercon 65 tables for a while. Lisa has been recruiting people to be on the committee for the version of Westercon 65 that will be held in Tonopah this year (in a different timeline). Lisa and I will host a party at Westercon 65 in this timeline where a little bit of Tonopah's Westercon is expected to leak through.
After dinner, we went to the Meet-the-Guests event, but the music was loud, so Lisa and I had to leave.
We attended and participated in a memorial service for Kathryn Daugherty, and raised a toast in her honor. Many people in Bay Area fandom were there sharing their memories of Kathryn.
We also briefly visited the party floor, ending up in the Fanzine Lounge where I found myself the subject of a question that Chris Garcia was asking David Clark: How many Worldcons has Kevin Standlee attended? Dave was right within the allowed margin of error (+/-1). I had to count it up myself, and the answer is, as of right now, 24 (1984 and 1989-2011 inclusive).
Lisa was feeling very tired and I'm none to great myself, plus we're commuting, so we called it a night early and headed back to the apartment. We needed a few snack-like things and walked around the corner to the 7-Eleven, where we saw standing on the corner a couple of extremely kawaii girls in anime-costumes, and there were other people inside the konbini who obviously were attending FanimeCon, which is happening in downtown San Jose this weekend.
I'm glad I don't have any morning commitments. I do want to help out at the Westercon 66 table tomorrow, but I also have panels at 2 and 4:30, and Lisa and I have tickets for Thanks for Playing the Game Show Show Saturday night, so we won't be around BayCon that night. We'll be back on Sunday. |
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| Signal Boost: Project Save Annabelle |
[May. 25th, 2012|10:56 pm] |
I've had some scary moments with my two pups, and I'm lucky to have insurance for them. Even so, the bills mount so quickly. But you'll pay anything, because you just want them to be okay again.
Originally posted by ![[info]](http://l-files.livejournal.net/userhead/567?v=1322424142) harnessphoto at Signal Boost: Project Save AnnabelleI don't normally re-post these things, but I'm seeing this one everywhere and I would hope people would help me out if it ever came to life or death with Herbie or Ozzy. I donated and just $5 from everyone would go a long way. Help if you can. Re-post if you think other people you know might be inclined to do the same. ( Great Dane in need ) |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 25th, 2012|07:34 pm] |
I often feel quite guilty (like today), writing about terrible things like murder and slavery and virulent pre-Civil-War racism and having such a ripping good time, chortling to myself as Ben January and E.A. Poe trade wisecracks - solemn horribleness of subject matter deserves a more sober attitude. If I were spiritually more developed I'd have one.
Incidentally (on the subject of not being spiritually developed AT ALL), I have an essay about the 9th Doctor Who - the season in which the show was re-booted - in the upcoming collection, Chicks Unravel Time, edited by Deborah Stanish and soon to be out through Amazon. (If I were more spiritually developed I'd remember the publisher off the top of my head, too...) Stanish and her co-editor (Myers?) collected, I am told, a woman writer, artist, fan, or whatever for every season of the show: according to the ad I saw, Diana Gabaldon (whoo-hoo!) contributed her thoughts on one of my favorite Companions, the wonderful Jamie McCrimmon (still, I believe, the longest-running Companion). (Well, with one thing and another, they ALL run a LOT....)
I've recently realized that the lovely Cupcake isn't so much a tuxedo cat: with her little white gloves on her front feet, she has short white stockings on her back feet, with sketchy, trailing lines of white higher up the legs, giving the effect of a garter-belt. Thus, it isn't a tuxedo she's wearing but a French Maid outfit. No wonder Gus follows her around the house. |
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| oy, cats. |
[May. 25th, 2012|07:17 pm] |
Seeing me eat sauteed string beans, Boomer has decided that he too, must have sauteed string beans. In order to keep his nose out of my food, I gave him a piece. So far, he has sniiffed, licked, toothed, and otherwise pushed the bean around, but hasn't quite convinced himself to eat it.
But he is still quite interested in what's on MY plate. Because that's got to be better, right? |
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tired
poor puppy